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The Importance of Social Profiles

SEO

Google Now Shows Social Profile Results in Search Results

It’s official now. Google has begun integrating social profile results into search results.  Actually Google’s Social Search launched as beta in October 2009, but now Google has announced that it is showing social search results mixed in with standard search results.

What this means is that Google searchers will now see some search results from the people they have connected to on their Google profile, or in their Google Account.   The social sites Google pulls this information from include YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora and Blogger. Notably, Facebook is missing from the list despite the fact that around 600 million people use Facebook, and Bing has integrated Facebook information into its searches.

The search results integrate all social site information into one place and include photos, posts, blogs or links the people in your social network have posted on the topic of your search. It even shows a photo of the friend that posted the search result, and the website used for the post.

This change in search results may cause problems for websites that rely on organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), because the inclusion of these social results limits the number of other organic search listings that show.  SEO will have to focus more on the social networks from now on.

  • For SEO to take advantage of the new social search results, it might be beneficial to:
  • Actively post on Twitter using the keywords you use to optimize your website.  Follow as many relevant people as possible on Twitter in the hopes that they will follow you back.
  • Make sure all the people in your company are on Google Buzz, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook.
  • If possible, use Google’s email applications.  Add keywords to your email newsletters and other mass emails.
  • Have the experts in your company blog as often as possible using keyword rich text.

Also Google engineers have been rumored to be working on a social network that may be called Google Me.  Using all Google’s connected properties like Google Profile, Social Search, and Buzz, Google already has many important social networking features. By tying these sites together, Google could create a Facebook competitor that has the potential of becoming another ad network for Google.